


there's a sweetness in us

by salvage



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, The Jacket
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 20:14:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5599360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvage/pseuds/salvage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>The door swung open after a moment; Rey had still been half-hoping that her knock was light enough that Poe hadn’t heard it, or that Poe was out doing pilot things somewhere. But when he appeared before her, she couldn’t help but be glad. His hair was tousled, sticking up a little on one side as though he had been sleeping on it, and he wore a shirt with a short standing collar and a slim gap that revealed the hollow at the base of his throat. His face brightened when he saw her.</em><br/> <br/>Rey wants to fix Finn's jacket. She goes to Poe for help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's a sweetness in us

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so, so much to [Saezutte](http://archiveofourown.org/users/saezutte/pseuds/saezutte) for the last-minute beta read! She's the real MVP.
> 
> Preceded by [this ficlet from my writing blog](http://salvage-writing.tumblr.com/post/135912946126/star-wars-the-force-awakens-implied-future), in which Rey and Poe finally meet.

Rey tapped her knuckles lightly on the door to Poe’s quarters. She held Finn’s, or rather Poe’s, or rather _the_ jacket tightly to her chest with her left arm, pressing the worn material against the sleek front of the new vest the General had graciously given her. The fact that her new clothes were essentially a higher quality, upgraded version of her old clothes did not escape her, nor did the fact that the General took a suspiciously short time to get them to her. She found that she wore gratitude like she wore the new clothes: slightly uncomfortably, but only for its unfamiliarity.

The door swung open after a moment; Rey had still been half-hoping that her knock was light enough that Poe hadn’t heard it, or that Poe was out doing pilot things somewhere. But when he appeared before her, she couldn’t help but be glad. His hair was tousled, sticking up a little on one side as though he had been sleeping on it, and he wore a shirt with a short standing collar and a slim gap that revealed the hollow at the base of his throat. His face brightened when he saw her. 

“Rey,” he said, and he took his hand off the frame of the door to allow her into his room. As she walked past him she noticed for the first time that they were about the same height. He seemed to have few possessions; she had spent years wondering what characteristics she would have in common with a fighter pilot, but she had never thought that living sparsely would be one.

“Hi,” she said belatedly. 

“I admit, it’s not much to look at.” Rey whipped her head around to look at him. He shrugged. “We move around a lot.”

Rey shook her head and was surprised to find herself smiling. “No, no.” She seated herself gingerly in the single chair in one corner of the room, still clutching the jacket to her chest. “It’s nice. I was just... surprised.” 

“Surprised?” Poe seated himself on the bed, across from her. His face was bathed in warm yellow light. The cut on his cheek looked like it had started to heal. 

“I also… on Jakku. I didn’t have much.” She turned her face away, worrying at the burned edges of the jacket with her hands, afraid of insulting him. “I’m sorry.” 

“I won’t be insulted if you compare us,” Poe said softly.

It wasn’t quite what she intended but she looked up at him and a smile tugged at his lips and drew lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes. She nodded. She thought about her work table, strewn with machine parts and her soldering iron and her pliers and wrenches and all her other tools, and about her little plant and about Captain Ræth’s helmet and about the doll that she had made from a handful of rags and a flight suit she had found in the burned-out husk of a crashed vehicle. She thought about how, when the light shone on the orange fabric strongly enough, it seemed to illuminate the wall behind it, as though glowing from the inside of its own accord. She remembered painstakingly sewing the suit for the doll with the same care and attention she used when soldering delicate damaged parts of a capacitor or an actuator. 

“I need your help,” she said. She turned the jacket so Poe could see the gash slicing diagonally through the back. “I… didn’t know who to ask. Where can I find a needle and thread on the base?” 

“You want to fix it for him.” Poe held a hand out and Rey gave him the jacket. He examined it. “Shouldn’t be too hard.” The jacket still in one hand, Poe opened the top drawer of the small dresser beside the bed and shuffled through it, pulling out a small tin box. “Drag the chair over,” he said, tilting his head toward the table with its old-fashioned single lamp. 

Rey positioned the chair beside the dresser, and by the time she and Poe both sat, facing each other, in the brightest part of the circle of light given off by the lamp, she realized their knees knocked together if they weren’t careful but it was too late to move. Poe clearly didn’t mind. He, like Finn, seemed to welcome casual contact. 

The tin box had been painted red in a past life but was battered enough to be mostly silver at the corners and along the edges, marked on the sides and lid with a few craters. When Rey removed its lid, it revealed an array of needles and several different colors of thread. One, she noted, was the bright orange of the pilots’ flight suits. She held it up.

“The Resistance makes its pilots do their own repairs?” She smirked.

“I just figure it’s easier to do it myself than bother someone else.” Poe spread the jacket over his knees, fingers splayed over the well-used fabric. “My father taught me.”

Rey did not say that she taught herself to sew, like she taught herself to repair power converters and build engines and fly starships. She selected a spool of brown thread and a heavyweight needle. 

Poe didn’t ask Rey if she needed help. He handed her the jacket and watched her spread it over the flat surface of the dresser, determining the exact length of the gash, then hold the spool between her thumb and middle finger and pinch the loose end of the thread with her other hand and pull the two apart, tugging a little extra at the end. He took a small pair of scissors shaped like a bird from the sewing tin and cut the thread where she held it out to him. 

The lightsaber gash in the jacket was a fine cut, only a little burned around the edges. Rey threaded the needle and knotted the opposite end of the thread. The first stitch she made carefully, the jacket draped over her knees, pulling the thread through and then carefully lining up the needle so that next stitch was perfectly even. 

The room wasn’t entirely soundproof. The white noise of the constant motion of Resistance fighters in the base, the shuffle of shoes and wheels on the floors of the building and the rise and fall of voices like the distant wind over the sand dunes, filtered through the thin walls and the small gap under the door where the stone had been worn down by feet over the ages. It thrummed at the back of Rey’s senses like the buzz of the generator when she turned it on in her home on Jakku, strangely comforting. 

The noise was so constant and she was concentrating so intensely she didn’t, at first, notice the humming. It was only when a note broke that her attention tripped away from the long, even line of stitches and up to Poe’s face: smiling apologetically, caught out. 

He cleared his throat. “Might have misjudged my range,” he said. “Sorry if I disturbed you.” 

“What was it?” She was curious, now, the needle held loosely between her fingers. 

“A song from my mother’s homeworld. My grandfather sang it to me when my parents were away, fighting for the Rebellion. Apparently, even after they got back, I wouldn’t go to sleep without it, so my grandfather had to send a holovid of him singing the song because my parents were both tone deaf as anything.” 

Rey laughed. She had a blurred, unsteady vision of a family, two parents and a child, that she dredged to the surface of her mind whenever she had been feeling particularly lonely or particularly restless during her time on Jakku, their faces vague, their movements rough as though seen in a corrupted video file. This image came forth now, but she replaced the parents’ faces with some that she thought looked like Poe’s and she imagined them singing, terribly, and the dark-haired baby they tried to soothe just crying harder, fisting his tiny plump hands in their clothes in distress. It was sweeter than it was bitter. 

“Can you sing it for me?” She felt heat rise to her face and neck as she asked, but she held his gaze. 

The song was in a different language, but it didn’t matter. It was a soothing song, with a melody that rose and fell like the flight paths of the flitting steelpecker birds around the wrecked ships Rey would scavenge from: small, even, repetitive lifts and drops until it suddenly crested, rising above the landscape to touch the sky for a single, fleeting moment, then back to the steady up-and-down pattern. Poe’s voice was soft and a little hoarse. His eyes were closed. When he reached for the high note he tilted his chin up, the lamp light illuminating the line of his jaw and throat, his half-parted lips. 

He missed the note.

His eyes snapped open and she looked up from the jacket and he grimaced theatrically, one corner of his mouth drawing down to show his teeth, and then they both started laughing. 

“It was really lovely,” Rey said between giggles. 

“Almost,” Poe said. He braced his elbow on his knee and rested his chin on his hand, covering his mouth with his fingers. It was not enough to hide his wide smile. “I really thought I had it.” 

“It was fine,” Rey insisted. The jacket threatened to slide off her lap and she caught it, crumpling the material in her hand. “I barely noticed.” 

“Listen, I appreciate that you’d lie to spare my feelings, but…” 

“The song really was beautiful!” 

“All right. That, I will believe.” Poe had stopped laughing but his eyes were bright when he looked at her. 

Rey rearranged the jacket, tugging the thread taut and examining the long mended stretch and the short remaining gap she had yet to sew. Mischievously, she flicked her gaze up to Poe’s face for just a second. “I have a little bit of sewing left. You can continue, if you’d like.” 

“Oh, no,” Poe said. But after a moment of silence, the murmur of outside voices, the faint slide of the thread when she tugged a stitch tight, he began to sing again. 

It was a different song, one that stayed more in his vocal range, still in the beautiful, rolling language that Rey couldn’t identify. She remembered the green of Takodana: lush, endlessly varied, completely unimaginable to her until that moment. 

Even after Rey had tied off the thread, looping it in knot after knot and then leading the end back through the fabric so that it was invisible, she sat with the jacket in one hand and the needle in the other, silent, until Poe’s voice trailed off. 

“Thank you,” Rey said, tucking the needle back into its place in the sewing kit. She looked at him to be sure he knew what she meant. 

“Any time.”


End file.
